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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29280408">a shade amidst the shadowy dead</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/slashmarks/pseuds/basketofnovas'>basketofnovas (slashmarks)</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Dark Magic, Gen, Pre-Canon</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 04:40:24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,481</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29280408</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/slashmarks/pseuds/basketofnovas</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Cassiopeia Black and her sometimes student succeed in a discovery but fail to understand each other. A thank you gift for a beta.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Cassiopeia Black &amp; Tom Riddle | Voldemort, Cassiopeia Black/Original Female Character(s)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>26</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>a shade amidst the shadowy dead</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/Smudge_Rat/gifts">Smudge_Rat</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This can be read by itself, but may make more sense if you've read my <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/series/1876930">brilliant difficulty</a> series.</p><p>Written as a thank you gift for my Brit picker for that series, Smudge_Rat. The title and one other line are quotes from Sappho's fragments, as given <a href="https://www.uh.edu/~cldue/texts/sappho.html">here</a>.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The timer spell went off at ten minutes to one in the morning. Cassiopeia opened an eye reluctantly in the darkness, then the other. She sat up next, and Margaret protested in her sleep at the rush of cold air.</p><p>“Hush,” Cassie murmured, and cast a warming spell with a brief flicker of focus and no wand. Margaret went slack again as Cassiopeia got out of bed. “I’m so easily replaced, my heart,” Cassie said to her sleeping lover, and went to get dressed in the dark. She pulled on a set of plain, hooded woolen robes, and piled her braid on top of her head. That was good enough for running tests. She’d be back in bed inside of an hour unless something went wrong. </p><p>The last thing she did before leaving the house was check the newest set of protective enchantments. Then, reassured that if a bomb hit the house while she was gone it would be transported harmlessly out to the middle of the ocean, she went to the front hall and Disapparated. </p><p>The lab wasn’t in the city and didn’t have any external lights, and it wasn’t in danger of being bombed by Germans, she hoped. Cassie had slapped the anti-artillery warding on top of the rest anyway when she came up with the design. A Dark Lord’s fortress was supposed to be impregnable, protected against the slightest interference and most unlikely attack... </p><p>And the novelty still hadn’t worn off. Cassiopeia was recently thirty-three years old, a recluse of a young woman. She had gone from the thinly-disguised Lady X, inspiration for the first comprehensive update to divorce law and first wife battery legislation the Wizengamot had seen since its founding as a permanent body, to Britain’s acknowledged preeminent scholar of the Dark Arts only a few years ago. If the magical protections on her laboratory were overcompensating, well, at least she hadn’t resorted to making her home in a moldering castle and enchanting swarms of bats to precede her every move like some people.</p><p>Instead the laboratory was in a roundhouse rebuilt on top of the ancient foundations. Cassiopeia had recreated the walls carefully with magic, enchanting the materials every step of the way and using - some would say perverting - the resonance of the ancients and the rituals that had once been conducted here. Then she had added magic to the building itself. </p><p>Stepping inside, Cassiopeia saw only an empty, clean round house with a dirt floor and solid wooden walls: the first layer. She walked to the dead center of the room and halted. She closed her eyes and raised a hand, and said, “Death is an evil. That’s what the gods think, or they would die.”</p><p>The walls spun around her. If she opened her eyes - well, <em>she</em> would end up nauseous. She also got seasick, which was why she generally kept them closed at this stage of entrance and stayed off of boats. But aside from that point, if she opened her eyes she would see the contents of the room whirling around her, too, and the walls dancing.</p><p>The room settled, slowly, and Cassiopeia opened her eyes. </p><p>This layer was still round, but space had been distorted and stretched so that it was three or four times as large as the small roundhouse in the real layer.” It was divided in half by a line of bookshelves. The left half, from Cassie’s perspective, was lined with more shelves, the center taken up by a broad wooden table filled with books, notebooks, random ingredients, and tools. The right semi-circle had a bare stone floor with magical formulae chalked around the edges, sealing the environment and controlling it. The more delicate experiments were kept there and the magic changed out, depending on what was going on.</p><p>At the moment there was nothing especially fragile about the atmosphere inside the controlled semicircle except that the temperature and humidity had to be kept steady, so Cassiopeia stepped across the runes unhesitatingly and walked to the three cauldrons hanging atop Bunsen burners. Of course these weren’t powered with actual gas, but Cassie had been able to alter them to take advantage of the relatively finer controls while using magically-fueled heat. The second alarm for the hour of one went off just as she swung the first cauldron off the flame.</p><p>The color and consistency on that one were just as they ought to be. Cassie checked the second, then the third cauldrons, and the second, too, was perfect, but the third had a troubling opaline cast to the surface that brooded of instability to her. She put up shields around that one in case it exploded, then reached for... Ah, good. Tom had already prepped for the next stage. Cassiopeia leaned down and checked the labels, written in his preternaturally even, legible hand, then cast identifying charms even though she was sure they would be correct. They were.</p><p>She took up six ounces of human flesh exactly for the first cauldron and lowered them in with the ladle, careful not to splash, checking the clock and counting off in her head as the pieces of finger dissolved, before she put the cauldron back on the heat and reset the timer. The second cauldron used macaque flesh - obtaining it during the war had been hell - and the third, the one that looked like it might explode at any minute, goat. Each matched the previous main ingredients: blood and powdered bone of the same species added to a mostly innocuous base. Each cauldron went back on the burner at the prescribed lower heat setting, to cook for another six hours. </p><p>The goat potion looked steadily worse in a matter of seconds, but it was encouraging that the macaque flesh could achieve a similar effect to human. Macaque was expensive enough she probably wouldn’t convince many to actually use it but once she <em>knew</em> macaque worked she could find a cheaper substitution. The essential problem with substituting for human sacrifice was that it had so many disparate uses it was sometimes hard to deduce what the purpose was, especially in older and piecemeal contexts...</p><p>Finished noting down the state of the potions, Cassie went to the library half, the idea of going back to bed immediately forgotten. Circling around to the potions shelving, she stopped halfway, a small twitch of a half-smile disturbing her serene face. Tom had fallen asleep with his face in a book in the armchair between bookshelves. </p><p>In a moment he would wake, hearing her move. He would politely pretend he had lost track of time, and she would politely pretend to believe him. Of course, she knew perfectly well he was sleeping in the lab all the time for the summer, and she knew why. The school-leaving age in muggle Britain was fourteen, and Tom had therefore been expected to leave the orphanage two years ago. Presumably he had found a way to manage on his own. His talent for Legilimency and wandless compulsion would have made it possible if not comfortable. Tom didn’t appreciate concern on his behalf, so Cassiopeia hadn’t offered any. She had only avoided pointing out to him that the enchantments on the lab told her everything that happened within it and therefore she knew perfectly well when he came and went. Or when he didn’t.</p><p>She moved on to the bookshelf she had sought, waiting patiently. Tom set alarm charms around himself before he slept - one more hint that he was faking the accidents - and she had deliberately strayed into their radius as she moved on. Avoiding them completely would be rude. She counted in her head. Tom would delay his supposed waking, but he hadn’t yet learned to vary the pattern quite enough...</p><p>On forty seconds she heard a yawn behind her, the creak of the chair and flutter of pages as Tom sat up. “Lord Cassiopeia?” he said, with another yawn. “What time is it? --I must have fallen asleep.”</p><p>“A quarter after one.” She didn’t make him call her by the formal title, but he persisted in it anyway. She would admit in her own mind she felt a jolt of surprised pleasure whenever anyone did. She hadn’t enjoyed being addressed as Lady Nott during her first marriage, and that memory made the neutrality of the earned title sweeter. Of course she also knew this was why Tom did it. He offered respect when he saw benefit to himself, mostly. At his age and under his circumstances she couldn’t - wouldn’t - complain about that.</p><p>He would be deciding how best to frame his protests that it had been an accident now. It was a mark against his usual brilliance that he hadn’t yet realized her family owned a lot of muggle property and therefore Cassiopeia Black knew perfectly well what the muggle school-leaving age was, and had also asked after him at Wool’s Orphanage when she started teaching him to find out about his background before the age of fourteen. But he had little actual experience of high pureblood society, and his closest friends at school, according to Orion, were Reinhard Lestrange and Abraxas Malfoy, from a different segment of it, and Lucretia, who would give no information about the family she could avoid divulging. The conversations about him falling asleep had become tiresome weeks ago, so before he made up his mind she said, “The human and macaque are indistinguishable from each other at this stage - still - but the goat is becoming unstable. I put up shields. Mind you’re careful with it if you check it.”</p><p>“I will be.” She heard Tom get up and put the book aside, and leaned forward into the shelves herself, picking books. The macaque wasn’t particularly well known in European potions but she had a rather bad French translation of an Arabic treatise on magic using monkey parts - she wanted the original but hadn’t been able to obtain a copy yet - and it might be helpful here. Or was the importance of the macaque its ability to stand in for a human symbolically and not the actual phylogenetic relationship? She picked up another reference on the physical properties of human flesh in potions to compare with the one on monkeys and then skipped back three shelves to find a monograph on symbolic substitution in ritual...</p><p>Cassiopeia was rapidly absorbed in the issue. An uncertain amount of time later she became aware that Tom had returned from where he’d gone to eat, in the second layer of the roundhouse, and was now staring at her from across the table.</p><p>“You have a question,” she said at length. She rarely noticed interruptions when she was working. (It was just as well that the Notts had hired a nurse by default for her daughters. She felt a distant flare of grief at that thought and quickly buried her feelings again.) She had told Tom to interrupt her forcefully before, but he never did it. Probably he liked knowing she was oblivious to his actions much of the time.</p><p>Tom hesitated. “It’s rude,” he said. She didn’t look up, but his tone affected shyness, as usual when he perceived that he was pushing boundaries. He had yet to brush against many of hers, something he did not appear to realize. The ones he <em>did</em> he danced on with great casualness, since like most of their field he didn’t seem to notice the ramifications of the amount of energy she spent trying to make human sacrifice seem obsolete and expensive.</p><p>“Is this when when you ask me what the point is of going to great trouble to substitute an expensive exported monkey for cheap and easily-obtained humans?” She had been expecting this question for most of the experiment. “While there are places where macaque would be an easier substitute for human flesh, I don’t anticipate it catching on in Britain. But I might find something better that can. And there is always merit in reducing the waste of human life, if only because the more casually you kill the less it means to you and the less effective the greater sacrificial rites are.” She hadn’t killed anyone for this experiment, either, the flesh was from the executioner, but that point would have been lost on Tom so she hadn’t bothered.</p><p>She heard a quick intake of breath and knew this last point had reached him, on the other hand. “But really,” he said slowly, “How often do you expect to <em>use</em> those? Aren’t there better methods for most of their means?”</p><p>“There is <em>nearly</em> always a more convenient and less drastic option,” Cassiopeia acknowledged. “You might - with a minimal amount of exaggeration - say that all of the development of magic since its first invention has been coming up with workarounds for the greater rites. But the point of the greater rites is that they <em>are</em> available when you’re desperate and generally it’s better not to risk that, for the same reason you keep the fail safes in good order even if you hope you aren’t going to need to find out in an emergency.” If Tom had a major failure aside from their culture’s usual disregard of human life it was a certain tendency to assume he was immortal. Although Cassiopeia could say the same of most teenagers of her acquaintance.</p><p>“That’s true,” Tom said in a tone that let her know he wasn’t convinced. “But it wasn’t what I was going to ask, Lord Cassiopeia.”</p><p>“And what was that?” Cassiopeia asked, turning a page in the book and squinting at the writing. In retrospect she wasn’t sure whoever had translated the work had actually spoken Arabic. Or French.</p><p>“It’s more of an observation, really,” Tom said. Cassiopeia looked up, arched her eyebrows. “You have lipstick.” He touched his jaw, just where it became the neck, on the left side. </p><p>Cassiopeia blinked and conjured a mirror. “So I do.” She vanished the mirror and the lipstick together. “I got dressed in the dark,” she said blandly.</p><p>“That’s not the color you usually wear.” Tom paused. “Actually, it’s not the texture most witches’ cosmetics are at all.”</p><p>“That would be because it’s the Elizabeth Arden tube stuff,” said Cassiopeia, who didn’t pay a lot of attention to makeup brands but had had to take the thing away from the cat two days ago. “And I am not the one who wears it, no.” She looked up, finally, since she couldn’t approximate Tom’s reaction to <em>that</em> pronouncement.</p><p>He was staring at her, lips parted to speak, but clearly had not yet settled on an answer. She didn’t share the family talent for Legilimency, and couldn’t directly look into his head, but she was quite sure the shock was genuine this time. Whatever he was going to say was interrupted, however when the potion made with goat finally exploded.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I think it was an author's note in AndrewWolfe's fic that drew my attention to the fact that orphans were generally kicked out at fourteen in the thirties/forties, at the age children left school, and led me to look it up. I assume Tom Riddle didn't want to admit as much to Dippet in the memory he shows Harry.</p><p>The other Sappho quote is Cassie's password.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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